Try it, you'll like it...or maybe not!

I think that it was my father, your grandfather who instilled in me my lifelong interest in food. He loved food and was an excellent and sophisticated cook. I remember going to the bar/restaurant where he used to meet up with his friends in Mar del Plata to seek him out and see what he was up to. They would be having a drink and eating what now would be considered "tapas" then known as "platitos" or little dishes. You'd order any drink and the waiter would bring a variety of these platitos of food to nibble on. Some peanuts, cheese, salami, to a few snails (escargot right!) and shrimps among other things. Since there were 6 or 7 men sitting around the table, there were endless little dishes of food. He would sit me on his lap and insisted that I "try" something that I hadn't eaten before. A shrimp here, a snail there, some octopus. I would try to decline but to no avail. He'd say "try it...if you don't like it, you don't have to eat it ever again!" The same rule was applied at home. Tripe, calamari, spaghetti with squid ink, bacalao (cod) and all sorts of things that a kid in the US would consider child abuse if asked to eat it instead of the better known hot dog or peanut butter sandwiches!

 Some I liked and some I didn't but rather than never eating it again, I found that a few years later I would develop a taste for it. And so it was that I ate oysters and would go to the beach with a lemon and a knife and dig for clams that were just rinsed in sea water and squirted with lemon before being devoured. There are very few things that I will not try.

It saddens me that he died before I moved to Japan. I would have loved to put a piece of raw fish on his plate and tell him that he needed to try it! He would have loved sushi!

So I guess I raised my kids to experiment with tastes and foods, just like he did with me. We all certainly come from good cooking and eating stock! Tony was also a lover of food and a great cook. Hence Charmaine:-)